Fedora Weekly News Issue 293

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 293[1]. The FWN 293 is a live news stream of the mid April 2012.

The lead news of the week comes from the major announcement, development, the Trade Press and Fedora Marketing, and Security Advisories symmetrically. The starting news is the Changes to the Packaging Guidelines through Announcing the release of Fedora 18 Beta followed by Fedora 17 Beta thread.

One of the breaking news of this month is Fedora 18 Release name voting and Poll for whether to continue naming releases. Meantime, the leading news is the Fedora 17 for Power Alpha by David Aquilina. In this issue, the community can get details of the Fedora 17 Beta Go/No-Go Meeting, Round 3, Wednesday, April 11, @17:00 Eastern and the declared GOLD for the community (the Fedora 17 Beta is declared GOLD).

Another lead news on Trade Press and Fedora Marketing giants of Fedora is that Fedora Project has announced the release of the first and only beta version of Fedora 17, the final version of which is due for publication on 22 May. An outstanding review has been an eye catching topic titled as the beefy Fedora could use a dash of miracle whip by Jason Brokes which sounds harmonious with the news HealthCheck Fedora: Where's the beef?

Recent issues of FWN are now being published to Fedora Insight[2]. Insight offers RSS features, multimedia capabilities and more, beyond the mailshot/wiki FWN you have come to know and love. Try it out, and we'd love to hear your feedback!

Fedora Project is the right place for you and you can simply show your interest in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see our 'join' page[3]. We welcome reader feedback: news@lists.fedoraproject.org

Breaking News of the Week

[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

"A bundling exception for boost within Passenger was granted, due to the
intrusive nature of the forked changes, the efforts of the maintainer to
merge as many of them as possible into the upstream boost source tree,
and the visible efforts of the upstream to keep the bundled copy of
boost in sync with the current boost releases.

The package must also include a Requires: bundled(boost) = $VERSION
where $VERSION is the boost version being bundled.

Packages which have SysV initscripts that contain 'non-standard service
commands' (commands besides start, stop, reload, restart, or
try-restart) must convert those commands into standalone helper scripts.
Systemd does not support non-standard unit commands.

These guidelines (and changes) were approved by the Fedora Packaging
Committee (FPC).

Many thanks to Kevin Fenzi, Bohuslav Kabrda, Brett Lentz, Marcela
Mašláňová, Bill Nottingham, Vít Ondruch, Mamoru Tasaka, and all of the
members of the FPC, for assisting in drafting, refining, and passing
these guidelines.

As a reminder: The Fedora Packaging Guidelines are living documents! If
you find something missing, incorrect, or in need of revision, you can
suggest a draft change. The procedure for this is documented here:
[14]

Announcing the release of Fedora 18 Beta!

Dennis Gilmore[1] on Tue Apr 17 14:17:02 UTC 2012 announced in two thread[2][3],

"Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... the Beta
release of Beefy Miracle! Flying 'round the world at the speed of the
intertubes, delivering progress, mustard, and freedom to the masses.

We are delighted to announce the availability of the Beta release of
Fedora 17. Want to get a taste of the future? Download it now:

What is the Beta Release?

The Beta release is the last important milestone of Fedora 17. Only
critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading to the general
release of Fedora 17 in May. We invite you to join us in making Fedora
17 a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable
feedback.

Of course, this is a beta release, meaning that some problems may still
be lurking. A list of the problems we already know about is found at
the Common F17 bugs page, seen here:

Features

This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and
under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing
state of free software. Here are just a few of the new features:

On the desktop: GNOME 3.4 introduces many user experience improvements,
including new search capabilities in the activities overview, improved
themes, and enhancements to the Documents and Contacts applications. A
new application, GNOME-boxes, provides easy access to virtual
machines. Additionally, GIMP 2.8, the newest version of the GNU Image
Manipulation Program, brings new improvements such as single-window
mode, layer groups, and on-canvas editing.

For developers: You never sausage a great array of development tools!
Fedora 17 includes a pre-release of Juno, the release of the Eclipse
SDK expected in June 2012. Java 7 (and OpenJDK 7) is the default Java
runtime and Java build toolset, and GCC 4.7.x is now the primary
compiler in Fedora. Other language refreshes include shipping Ruby
1.9.3, the latest stable version of the Ruby language, PHP 5.4, the
latest PHP stack, and Erlang has also been updated to the R15 release.

Under the hood, and in the cloud: The Cluster stack in Fedora includes
numerous and significant updates for both high availability and
load-balancing applications. Fedora 17 utilizes Linux kernel 3.3, with
improved btrfs and ext4 filesystems, GMA (poulsbo) graphics and
Broadcom wireless chipset support, and numerous other bug fixes and
enhancements. Firewalld is now the default firewall solution in Fedora,
providing dynamic firewall configuration capabilities. Finally,
OpenStack, a collection of services that can be used to set up and run
cloud compute and storage infrastructure, has been updated to the
latest release, 2012.1 (Essex).

And that's only the beginning. A more complete list and details of all
the new features in Fedora 17 is available here:

Contributing to Fedora

There are many ways to contribute beyond bug reporting. You can help
translate software and content, test and give feedback on software
updates, write and edit documentation, help with all sorts of
promotional activities, and package free software for use by millions
of Fedora users worldwide. To get started, visit
[9] today!"

Fedora 18 Release name voting and Poll for whether to continue naming releases

"Voting for the Fedora 18 release names has begun. You can find the
potential names in the voting application:
[3]

If you are a Fedora contributor (defined as having signed the FPCA and being
in one other Fedora group in the account system) then you are eligilbe to
vote.

This cycle, the Board is also asking contributors to let us know if we
should continue to have release names for future Fedora releases. Even
though the interface is the same, this portion is intended to be a poll
rather than a straight up vote. The Fedora Board will look at the answers
to determine if enough contributors value continuing to create release names
to make it worthwhile in the future. If it does seem desirable, the Board
will likely look into forming a working group to come up with a new method
for creating release names for future releases.

The poll for keeping release names is also found in the voting application:
[4]

Eligibility to answer the poll is the same as for being able to vote on the
names themselves (having signed the FPCA and being in one other group)."

Fedora 17 for Power Alpha Announcement

As it's already time again for another Fedora release on Power, this
time for Fedora 17 Alpha.

We've hit a couple of bumps along the road to the Alpha, but at long
last we're finally at a state where we're ready to release it to the
public.

Due to lack of developer time and hardware, Apple hardware support is at
this point completely untested. Especially with the switch to grub2 we
rely on community feedback and participation to make this work for this
release. So if you have the hardware and want it to work, patches
welcome! :)

One of our focuses in the lead up to the beta of Fedora 17 for Power
will be addressing architecture-specific packaging issues in as many
packages as possible. If you own a package in Fedora which has
ExclusiveArch or ExcludeArch set, please take a moment to verify that
the architectures you've excluded or are exclusive to are still correct
and sane.

I want to thank everyone involved in making this happen once more. Many
Fedora packagers and contributors have again stepped up and helped fix
issues that only appeared on Power hardware. Moreover the whole Fedora
Secondary Arch team has been doing a fantastic job to get us to where we
are now, especially considering that we had a complete switch of
builders and hub hardware, mass rebuild and a hub failure along the way!

As usual, you can reach the whole team on the #fedora-ppc IRC channel on
FreeNode and via our email list:

Fedora Events

The purpose of event is to build a global Fedora events calendar, and to identify responsible Ambassadors for each event. The event page is laid out by quarter and by region. Please maintain the layout, as it is crucial for budget planning.
Events can be added to this page whether or not they have an Ambassador owner. Events without an owner are not eligible for funding, but being listed allows any Ambassador to take ownership of the event and make it eligible for funding.
In plain words, Fedora events are the exclusive and source of marketing, learning and meeting all the fellow community people around you. So, please mark your agenda with the following events to consider attending or volunteering near you!

Fedora 17 Beta

"The Fedora Project has announced the release of the first and only beta version of Fedora 17, the final version of which is due for publication on 22 May. The beta implements all major changes in full, including the 'UsrMove' modification to filesystem structure, which will result in all applications and libraries being stored in subdirectories of /usr/." (The H)

Review: Beefy Fedora could use a dash of miracle whip

"While Fedora 17 is certainly beefy, what's been delivered with this
first and only beta is not particularly miraculous.

"Among the more noticeable changes is GNOME 3.4, the latest version of the GNOME 3 desktop. While the Fedora DVD still ships with a variety of desktops, the live CD defaults to GNOME and for some time now Fedora has served as a showcase for the development of GNOME 3."

HealthCheck Fedora: Where's the beef?

Jason Brooks posted[1] a lengthy (2,800 word) take on Fedora and its history from The H:

"To the right kind of user, with imagination and adventure to spare, Fedora is a thing of wonder. And for other users there are Fedora spins which give a different set of perspectives for those with specialised tastes and preferences. The value of Fedora to ordinary users is that it doesn't stand still, and each new release brings new possibilities."